GENEVA (Reuters) - Major powers gave Iran two weeks to answer calls to rein in its nuclear programme on Saturday or face tougher sanctions after talks ended in stalemate despite unprecedented U.S. participation.

A U.S. State Department spokesman said Washington hoped Iran now understood that it had a choice between cooperation and "confrontation, which can only lead to further isolation".

But prospects of ending a row that has triggered regional tensions and rattled oil markets looked dim as Iran's top nuclear negotiator insisted Tehran would not even discuss a demand to freeze uranium enrichment at the next meeting.

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - The leader of South Africa's ruling party said former President Nelson Mandela was the glue holding the country together, giving voice to long-held fears about the future of the fledgling democracy without him.

Jacob Zuma joined 500 guests, including President Thabo Mbeki and former Zambian leader Kenneth Kaunda, in birthday celebrations for Mandela on Saturday.

Mandela turned 90 on Friday, more than 14 years after becoming the country's first black president at the end of white minority rule.

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jul 18 (Tierramérica) - This year marks four decades of international recognition of people's right to decide how many children they want to have and when, and for that reason there is a great deal to celebrate, says Brazilian expert Carmen Barroso, of the International Planned Parenthood Federation.

Despite the wave of conservativism that threatens sexual and reproductive rights, today there are more advances than setbacks in Latin America when it comes to these issues, said Barroso, IPPF director for the Western hemisphere region.

Tierramérica spoke by telephone with Barroso, who holds a doctorate in social psychology, is a researcher in women's issues and founder of numerous non-governmental organisations around the world.

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TIERRAMÉRICA: But does the current wave of conservatism threaten those achievements?

CB: Yes, there are risks. The conservatives learned from the progressive movements. They decided to fight in a more systematic way for their positions. There were setbacks in Chile (legal ruling against the "morning after" contraceptive pill) and in Nicaragua (banning of therapeutic abortion in all cases). But there were victories in Mexico, where abortion was legalised in the capital, and in Colombia, which authorised it for three circumstances. Emergency contraception is accepted and distributed in most of the countries. There have been more successes than setbacks.

MOSCOW, Jul 12 (IPS) - The Soviet-era connections between Russia and some African states have collapsed into low levels of economic engagement between the former partners, with the arms trade remaining the exception.

This has led to appeals by African governments for a review of Russian foreign policies against the backdrop of growing ties between African states and China, India and Brazil.

One of the primary reasons for the change in Russian-African relations ``is the lack of knowledge and expertise on the side of African economies to be able to enter challenging markets. Russia certainly presents a challenge in terms of size of the country and language, as well as bureaucratic and other hurdles,'' Raksha Maharaj, a director at the South Africa-based Emerging Market Focus (EMF), told IPS.

``Not many African countries have the resources to be able to assist their companies in addressing these issues. As a result, they prefer to stick to regional or traditional markets,'' she concluded.

Government officials have said they cannot confirm or deny a claim made in a video that one of five British hostages in Iraq has killed himself.

The claim was made in a video given to the Sunday Times and alleges that a man known as Jason died on 25 May 2008.

Wednesday, July 16th 2008, 7:39 PM

I'm a lifelong Republican - a supply-side conservative. I worked in the Reagan White House. I was the chief economist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for five years. In 1994, I helped write the Republican Contract with America. I served on Bob Dole's presidential campaign team and was chief economist for Jack Kemp's Empower America.

This November, I'm voting for Barack Obama.

When I first made this decision, many colleagues were shocked. How could I support a candidate with a domestic policy platform that's antithetical to almost everything I believe in?

The answer is simple: Unjustified war and unconstitutional abridgment of individual rights vs. ill-conceived tax and economic policies - this is the difference between venial and mortal sins.

If sanity be culturally normative, then by the norms of this culture I claim insanity.

Gordon Brown prepared the ground for a historic realignment in the "war on terror" yesterday by setting out a four-point plan for withdrawal of British troops from Iraq by the end of next year.

Although he is refusing to set a detailed timetable for withdrawal, it is clear Mr Brown is in agreement with the US presidential candidate Barack Obama on the need for military action in Afghanistan to take priority. Both appear to be working to a 16-month timetable.

While Mr Brown addressed troops in Basra and met Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister, the Democratic hopeful arrived in Afghanistan to declare the US mission there to be more important than that in Iraq. Mr Obama is expected imminently in Iraq, and he will continue on to Europe. He will meet Mr Brown in Downing Street on Saturday.

Their approach is a marked departure from the policies of Tony Blair and President George Bush. But it nonetheless carries echoes of the "shoulder-to-shoulder" relationship between Britain and the US - if Mr Obama defeats his Republican rival John McCain in the November election.

Another endorsement of the Obama Plan.  Now, as I said in the subject, this one certainly matters.  When the British PM speaks, America listens.

Come on, Europe: Don't be pussies.  Back Obama.

WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

Why Do We Keep Renting the Same Old Movie?

From the late David Halberstam's 1991 book, The Next Century:

Voodoo economics, George Bush said in 1980 of Ronald Reagan's promise to do all existing things, increase defense spending and not increase taxes. Voodoo he said was, and voodoo it turned out to be. Reagan's decision to cut taxes at that moment was, in the words of James Schlesinger, a former Secretary of Defense and head of the CIA, "the most irreponsible decision in American fiscal history," and the passage of a decade has not made his judgment look harsh...

The most interesting thing about the Reagan years, the aspect least commented on, was that Reagan was so poor a conservative. It was a stunning reversal of the image he had projected for his entire political life.

"There was no connection at all between the image he projected as a true conservative and the substantive decisions of the government he professed to head," said Schlesinger, a quite conservative man himself. Rather than adjust America's spending to new realities, Schlesinger added, Reagan's fiscal and defense policies "adjusted our sights much higher than we could readily handle while at the same time reducing our capabilities to a point much lower...."

In the Reagan years we did not face the harsher new economic realities. Rather we winked at them and went on a binge of spending. It was capitalism gone mad. The eighties, Pat Moynihan noted, was a decade in which we borrowed a trillion dollars from the Japanese and gave a very good party for ourselves...

We began to sell off the future to pay for the present. As we softened the dollar, American companies went on the market at bargain-basement prices...

Thank God for the 22nd Amendment

Dana Milbank, in the Washington Post:

...But by one measure, Bush remains more enthusiastic than ever: his role as the nation's chief cheerleader. Yesterday's T-ball game, the 19th of his presidency -- followed by a dinner last night in honor of Major League Baseball, the third of his presidency -- brought to at least 95 the number of sporting-related events he has participated in during his time in the White House. He has done no fewer than 18 such events so far this year -- already passing his previous record of 13 in both 2001 and 2007.

The 95 sports events (with hundreds of athletic teams) are more than double the number of Cabinet meetings Bush has held (45), more than quadruple the number of meetings he has had with Russia's Vladimir Putin (22). The 19 T-ball games he has held are more than twice the number of meetings he has had with China's Hu Jintao (nine). And the three dinners he has held in honor of professional baseball are nearly equal to the five state dinners he has hosted during his entire presidency...

Regrettably, whoever takes over as America's President and Commander in Chief next January will face a rapidly narrowing range of options. With the fall of Communism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, America was given an almost limitless range of options. A series of bad decisions since that time have reduced that range to a paltry few, none of them particularly attractive. Running the narrows with a ship of state is a perilous enterprise.

In foreign affairs, most of the rest of the world is now hoping to see America take a fall. We have alienated the Russians, irritated the Chinese and dragged the Europeans into a "war against terror" that finds little support outside ruling elites. Virtually every European public would vote to pull out of Afghanistan tomorrow if given the chance. The elites go along only because of a residual fear of "losing the Americans," much as Berlin feared "losing the Austrians" if she did not support Vienna in 1914. Both were allied to a corpse, which at some point even the wizened moles who govern Europe may discern.

Militarily, the US has managed the contortionist's feat of getting various body parts stuck in different pits of quicksand. Washington counts on Iraq gaining stability, but the absence of a state means it can go unstable again overnight. The Afghan war is going the way Afghan wars do, as the Pashtun slowly get their act together to push the occupier out. Spillover from the war in Afghanistan is de-stabilizing Pakistan, with Washington accelerating the process by putting impossible demands on Iran by the US or Israel acting as a proxy grows, which would in turn pitch Iraq back into chaos as all the Shiite militias ganged up on us.

More, the money is about to run out. We seem to have forgotten that no activity the state can undertake is more expensive than war. If a tanking economy cuts off the money flow, what comes next? The Sunday, July 12 Cleveland Plain Dealer quotes a local investment advisor saying, "A year ago, I would have discounted the scenario of the next depression. After what I've seen this year, I don't discount anything anymore." The Fed is trying to head off a full-scale financial panic by turning itself into a pawnshop, but no one knows how long that trick will work. The whole Ponzi scheme that is the current US economy still depends on an inflow of $2 billion in foreign, money daily. What happens if, or when, that flow ceases?

Were American politics as sensible as the average flock of turkeys in a thunderstorm, the public would be asking those running for President just how they expected to steer through this narrows filled with rocks and shoals. Instead, all the public wants are more nostrums, more empty promises that somehow Big Brother will enable them to party on. Senator Obama and Senator McCain vie in proposing programs that cost more billions, to come from...where? Why, from the printing presses of course. Those presses are churning out dollars so fast already that we can feel the rumble all the way across the country - and the world.

When a person is addicted to crack cocaine, his problem is not that the price of crack is going up. His problem is what that crack addiction is doing to his whole body. The cure is not cheaper crack, which would only perpetuate the addiction and all the problems it is creating. The cure is to break the addiction.

Ditto for us. Our cure is not cheaper gasoline, but a clean energy system. And the key to building that is to keep the price of gasoline and coal -- our crack -- higher, not lower, so consumers are moved to break their addiction to these dirty fuels and inventors are moved to create clean alternatives.

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If you want to know what an alternative strategy might look like, read the speech that Al Gore delivered on Thursday to the bipartisan Alliance for Climate Protection. Gore, the alliance's chairman, called for a 10-year plan -- the same amount of time John F. Kennedy set for getting us to the moon -- to shift the entire country to "renewable energy and truly clean, carbon-free sources" to power our homes, factories and even transportation.

... all progress depends on the unreasonable mensch.
(apologies to G.B. Shaw)